New York Times building (Wikimedia Commons)
Hundreds of advertorials filled with Chinese communist propaganda published by the New York Times in an financial deal with Beijing have been quietly deleted.
The Washington Free Beacon reported the Times' move to end its partnership with the Communist Party organ China Daily is part of "a society-wide reckoning about the cozy relationships between the Chinese government and American institutions, from the NBA to Harvard University."
"We made the decision at the beginning of this year to stop accepting branded content ads from state run media, which includes China Daily," a Times spokeswoman told the Free Beacon.
The Times has run more than 200 propaganda articles in the last decade, "some of which sugar-coated China's human rights abuses," the Free Beacon said.
At the same time, the paper has run stories about Chinese government oppression.
But a 2019 video ad the Times posted on its website promoted Xinjiang tourism by depicting the oppressed Uyghur people as content under Chinese rule.
U.S. papers such as the Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have received millions of dollars in exchange for "disseminating Chinese propaganda to millions of unassuming Americans," the Free Beacon said.
In Congress, the China Task Force has been spearheading efforts to rein in the distribution of Chinese propaganda.
A member of the task force, Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., said he hopes the other news outlets "follow suit and start putting American values over communist bribes."
The Free Beacon previously found that China Daily failed to follow federal disclosure requirements about its relationship with U.S. media outlets.
Banks and 34 other congressional Republicans followed up with a demand that the Justice Department investigate the outlet.
China Daily responded by submitting a revised disclosure of its U.S. activities since 2016. It revealed previously undisclosed details about its ties with U.S. media.
Among them were that the Post and the Journal each received more than $100,000 per month to run print versions of Chinese propaganda articles, the Free Beacon reported.
A Post spokesman told the Free Beacon his paper has not published any China Daily advertorials since 2019. But the spokesman but did not clarify whether or not the relationship has been formally terminated.
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